In recent weeks, another ’60s hero bit the dust. Cesar Chavez, the celebrated labor activist of the National Farm Workers Association, is now being canceled—his name erased from streets, statues removed, and marches in his name called off. Of course, there is a compelling reason for this change, however late it may be in coming and whatever the motives. Being a serial sexual abuser and rapist of underage girls is not a good look for someone purportedly on the side of the powerless.
His fans, however, might wonder why Chavez has been singled out. Particularly when he is hardly the only leftist icon of the ’60s to have had a track record of this kind of criminality and moral turpitude. Even so, those other figures are still recognized as heroes—their biographies taught in the schools without criticism or question. Indeed, at least one of them even has streets, monuments, and a national holiday—his legacy in no danger of being memory-holed anytime soon.
Martin Luther King, of course, tops the list of these offenders. The god of the multiculturalist American left apparently declined to intervene when one of his pals decided to rape a woman. He not only watched and failed to report it to police, but laughed as the crime was being committed. One would think more people on the left would at least be capable of hearing about this without immediately accusing the person mentioning it of being a racist, but that has not been the case. King also reportedly engaged in days-long orgies with prostitutes—at events he organized for African-American preachers—that included perverse sex shows.
But King’s record here is completely eclipsed by that of another black civil rights hero: Eldridge Cleaver of Black Panther fame. Cleaver did a stint in prison for rape before he became a hero on the left. Many on the contemporary left would prefer to hide this fact of his history, but some embrace it as a perhaps unpleasant yet perfectly consistent element of his ideological coming to consciousness. Those who take this position argue Cleaver raped white women as an explicit “political act.” And, in fact, that was his own accounting of his actions in Soul on Ice, a book you can still find on the syllabi of Black Studies courses today.
